And How Will You Be Paying: Cash, Charge Or Fraud?

One reason such crime persists is the ridiculous deference given plastic-waving customers in most stores.

The woman who used a stolen credit card with my wife's name on it to charge a $2,213.20 purchase at the Best Buy in Evanston on Dec. 10 is not only dishonest, she's a fool.

The receipt from that transaction shows that she used the card to buy a universal remote control unit, a pack of AA batteries, a $1,700 Packard Bell computer and a monitor.

To this, the response can only be, "Packard Bell? Honey, that's a paperweight compared to the $3,000 top-of-the-line Compaq for sale in the same store. Your punishment for this crime will be to feel the pain of rapid obsolescence and bitter RAM envy."

Odds against any other punishment are slight. Such thieves tend to vanish before anyone knows there is a problem. In this case, the mock Mrs. Zorn ran up about $40 in charges at a Chicago Amoco station two days later, then disappeared--Visa didn't call us with a polite inquiry until Monday night, nearly a week later.

The misadventure began when my wife's wallet was swiped in a movie theater Dec. 3. With a few phone calls we canceled all the cards (those of you who pay to belong to a service that does this for you are suckers, by the way) before the thief could use them and waited for new ones to arrive in the mail.

The First Card Visa never made it. Somewhere in the postal stream between Delaware, whence the card was mailed, and the floor of our front hall, where mail lands after sailing through the chute, someone intercepted it.

Thus it became "NRI" in credit card industry lingo--Not Received as Issued--and part of an $82 million annual problem that in turn makes up about 11 percent of overall credit card fraud.

Card interception is often perpetrated by street gang members, said U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Paul Griffo. After someone steals the envelope--and fewer than 1 in 8 of the 4,565 people arrested for stealing mail in fiscal '95 were postal employees--the hot, unsigned cards are quickly resold, often for a couple of hundred dollars.

Thieves then sign and use the cards before the intended recipients even begin to miss them. The ones who know the ropes, such as the spousal impostor, spend big and then dump the card before creating a trail for investigators.

This is no more my problem than yours. I don't eat the cost of the purloined Packard Bell. Best Buy doesn't eat it. First Card Visa does, for now. But in the end it will show up in the cost of credit passed along to consumers and stores alike.

And one reason such crime persists, it should be said, is the ridiculous deference given plastic-waving customers in most stores. The Best Buy manager said his checkout clerk asked for nothing from the masquerader other than her Visa card--no photo ID, no checkbook, nothing--before letting her walk out with a bigger haul than most bank bandits get.

Such nonchalance is the practice in most stores, I've noticed, where even comparative scrutiny of the sales signature with the card signature is rare.

"It becomes a customer service issue," said Allan Trosclair, Visa's vice president for fraud control. He cited such potential problems as slower checkout lines, discrimination lawsuits and embarrassment in challenging legitimate patrons, and he noted that since only $1 in $1,000 is fraudulently charged, the bother and risk are often not worth the point-of-purchase fuss.

Increasingly, the industry has come to rely on card-activation programs, an innovation proposed by postal inspectors in which a recipient cannot use his card until he calls an 800 number and discloses, say, his mother's maiden name. Such schemes, still used only in certain neighborhoods, along with increased surveillance within the postal system, have cut annual NRI losses in half since 1992, Griffo said.

Also nipping at thieves, Trosclair said, are sophisticated transaction-monitoring systems introduced in the last two years. These so-called "intelligent" computer programs are trained to spot minor yet fishy aberrations in the buying habits of consumers.

First Card spokesman Tom Kelly said the high dollar figure on the first transaction put a red flag on our account, but I like to think otherwise.

I like to think that a truly intelligent computer examined that purchase, coughed discreetly to its human supervisors and said, "Not, I'm afraid, the Zorns."